in seafood restaurants.
It was before her time, so I’d been explaining this to my daughter, Constance, filling her in on the history and heritage of Old Lud.
During the school year Connie was off in Fairlawn much of the day, but recently I’d begun to notice that the kid was behaving a little uneasily, that she’d go to her room as soon as she came home and bury herself in homework, most of it for extra credit. Connie had never been what you’d call a grind, but now she asked her mother to drive her to the libraries over in Wyckoff or Ridgewood almost every day for the books she used for those seemingly endless research projects she was working on that year. She’d return with armloads, entire shelves, but soon complained that the public libraries in those smaller towns had limited holdings and that only the main library in Newark could serve her learned purposes.
“Oy,” Shelley would kvell, pointing after Connie as she disappeared into her room, proudly beaming and breaking out into her broken, makeshift Yiddish. “Look at the daughter-le, the scholar-le. Just like the papa-le!”
And now she came back with two times the books, three. Shelley checked books out for her on her card.
We started to worry she wasn’t getting enough fresh air, we began to fret about her eyes.
But when school was out that year Connie’s grades were about the same as they’d always been, maybe a little poorer. We’d seen the books she was always reading, the pens she used up, the pencils she wore down.
And now, in summer, she wouldn’t leave the house at all, but, having discovered term papers, continued to write them, to take on abstruse, incredible, impossible topics—how the discovery of rubber and the invention of the bouncing ball were responsible for the idea of points in sports, what, given the notion of the diatonic scale, the first tune would have had to have been.
We couldn’t tell her to go out and find a friend to play with. She was Lud’s only living child. And that’s when it occurred to me that my daughter was terrified of her hometown. And how I came to speak to her of the history of the place, to explain its odd sociology, and even, to get her out of the house and out into what we had for a world, to go strolling with her in the graveyards, reading the headstones with her and, when they belonged to people I had buried, trying to explain, to the limited extent I could, what I knew of them, their families, trying to show Connie that they weren’t just dead people, the abundant ghosts that haunted her imagination, but as real as the kings and heroes whose histories she’d been taking notes on in her copybooks all year.
“Dov Peretz Fish, Daddy?”
I peered at the dates on the stone. “1821 to 1847, Connie?”
“Sorry. Samuel Shargel. Ira Kiefer.”
“There was a Shargel in the slipcover business. Was his name Samuel?”
“1973.”
“Too early,” I said.
“You weren’t here in 1973?”
“I was here. The Shargel I’m thinking of couldn’t have died more than two or three years ago. They’re probably related. What was that other name?”
“Ira Kiefer?”
“Ira Kiefer, Ira Kiefer.”
“1982, Dad.”
“Oh, sure,” I said, “ I ra Kiefer.” I shut my eyes. “Beloved, loved, oved, ed … Brother! Beloved brother of … I forget their names. There were four boys. In their forties, in their fifties. Ira was the youngest. A single man. Divorced, I think. I could be wrong about that, but I don’t recall any surviving children. There were nephews and nieces. That’s right, I remember. That’s what it was. He was their uncle. He had all these nephews and nieces. There must have been at least ten of them. Mom told them that if they had their bathing suits they could drop by afterwards for a dip. Sure,” I said, “Ira Kiefer.”
We’d leave little stones on the tops of the monuments. “Out of respect,” I told her, “a signal to the families that others have been here.” Though
It was before her time, so I’d been explaining this to my daughter, Constance, filling her in on the history and heritage of Old Lud.
During the school year Connie was off in Fairlawn much of the day, but recently I’d begun to notice that the kid was behaving a little uneasily, that she’d go to her room as soon as she came home and bury herself in homework, most of it for extra credit. Connie had never been what you’d call a grind, but now she asked her mother to drive her to the libraries over in Wyckoff or Ridgewood almost every day for the books she used for those seemingly endless research projects she was working on that year. She’d return with armloads, entire shelves, but soon complained that the public libraries in those smaller towns had limited holdings and that only the main library in Newark could serve her learned purposes.
“Oy,” Shelley would kvell, pointing after Connie as she disappeared into her room, proudly beaming and breaking out into her broken, makeshift Yiddish. “Look at the daughter-le, the scholar-le. Just like the papa-le!”
And now she came back with two times the books, three. Shelley checked books out for her on her card.
We started to worry she wasn’t getting enough fresh air, we began to fret about her eyes.
But when school was out that year Connie’s grades were about the same as they’d always been, maybe a little poorer. We’d seen the books she was always reading, the pens she used up, the pencils she wore down.
And now, in summer, she wouldn’t leave the house at all, but, having discovered term papers, continued to write them, to take on abstruse, incredible, impossible topics—how the discovery of rubber and the invention of the bouncing ball were responsible for the idea of points in sports, what, given the notion of the diatonic scale, the first tune would have had to have been.
We couldn’t tell her to go out and find a friend to play with. She was Lud’s only living child. And that’s when it occurred to me that my daughter was terrified of her hometown. And how I came to speak to her of the history of the place, to explain its odd sociology, and even, to get her out of the house and out into what we had for a world, to go strolling with her in the graveyards, reading the headstones with her and, when they belonged to people I had buried, trying to explain, to the limited extent I could, what I knew of them, their families, trying to show Connie that they weren’t just dead people, the abundant ghosts that haunted her imagination, but as real as the kings and heroes whose histories she’d been taking notes on in her copybooks all year.
“Dov Peretz Fish, Daddy?”
I peered at the dates on the stone. “1821 to 1847, Connie?”
“Sorry. Samuel Shargel. Ira Kiefer.”
“There was a Shargel in the slipcover business. Was his name Samuel?”
“1973.”
“Too early,” I said.
“You weren’t here in 1973?”
“I was here. The Shargel I’m thinking of couldn’t have died more than two or three years ago. They’re probably related. What was that other name?”
“Ira Kiefer?”
“Ira Kiefer, Ira Kiefer.”
“1982, Dad.”
“Oh, sure,” I said, “ I ra Kiefer.” I shut my eyes. “Beloved, loved, oved, ed … Brother! Beloved brother of … I forget their names. There were four boys. In their forties, in their fifties. Ira was the youngest. A single man. Divorced, I think. I could be wrong about that, but I don’t recall any surviving children. There were nephews and nieces. That’s right, I remember. That’s what it was. He was their uncle. He had all these nephews and nieces. There must have been at least ten of them. Mom told them that if they had their bathing suits they could drop by afterwards for a dip. Sure,” I said, “Ira Kiefer.”
We’d leave little stones on the tops of the monuments. “Out of respect,” I told her, “a signal to the families that others have been here.” Though
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